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By the Mule of Juan Valdez

We have three coffees from Colombia on our table today, one of which comes from an individual grower we’ve long admired, Nelson Melo, and the other two of which represent single coffee varieties from a community, La Florida, where we’re purchasing coffee for the first time this year.

Style of Tasting

Cup

Cupping these coffees—especially the caturra and castillo from La Florida—will be the best way to appreciate their differences.

Notes on the Coffees

Exploring the flavors that coffee varieties impart to our palates is always a treat, and the fact that this week’s varieties also represent our very first taste of coffees we just received from a brand-new relationship in Nariño, Colombia, makes this week’s exercise all the more special! Coffee-driven souls in Durham and Asheville will be glad they opted for slurping over shopping. The castillo and caturra lots are the varieties of which I speak, and they come from La Florida, which is a community of coffee farmers whom we met in an unusual way: instead of receiving a sample from an importer and exporter or a group of farmers, we instead found this coffee through a development project led by the non-profit organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The organization’s Borderlands project was founded in 2011 with the intent to develop differentiated markets for coffee producers and, since we joined the project’s board in 2012, Counter Culture has been tasting coffees and making recommendations about how farmers might improve the quality of their coffee and obtain higher prices.

One of the big questions that farmers globally have to wrestle with is that of what variety of coffee to grow, because variety one has different characteristics to recommend it: some varieties offer disease resistance, some are more productive and others have intense, delicious flavors that make them attractive. Along with the advantages, however, there are inevitable tradeoffs and many of the most productive, disease-resistant varieties don’t taste as good as their more fragile counterparts. In Colombia, the varieties decision has been exemplified by a battle between caturra and castillo, with the former being an older type that is susceptible to the coffee leaf rust fungus but tastes good, while the latter is a newer type developed for rust resistance and a questionable reputation for quality. Many farmers have both varieties planted on their farms because it’s still unclear which offers better financial returns and less risk. As a member of the Borderlands project, we have tasted hundreds of samples of these two varieties and we’ve seen great examples of both. Our preference tends to be caturra, but your tasters might not feel the same way, so I’d love to hear feedback from your audience about preferences.

Just north of Nariño is the region of Cauca, home of the farmers responsible for CCC’s La Golondrina coffee these past seven years. Nelson Melo, who is originally from Nariño’s capital, Pasto, leads the Orgánica association and grows exceptional coffee (of the caturra variety, if you’re curious) on his farm outside the city of Popayán. We have loved Nelson’s coffee since we first tasted it in 2007, but because it was committed to another buyer before we started working with Orgánica, we didn’t have a chance to buy it until 2014. The combination of anticipation, superb cup quality, and Nelson’s personal passion for organic agriculture make this coffee one of the most exciting of our year and we can’t wait to share this extraordinary single-farmer lot in January.

Rollout Dates and Availability

La Florida’s caturra lot rolls out next week and should be around for a couple of months, while the castillo lot is just for Friday fun and not something that will appear on our menu. Nelson Melo’s coffee will inaugurate our new limited-release packaging in early January and we imagine we will sell through it in a month or so.

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Hello, East Timor!

After an eight-year hiatus, Counter Culture is bringing coffee from the tiny island nation of East Timor back to our offering list and this week we’ll taste the fantastic specimens we’ve chosen to purchase from the communities of Huapu and Lacau.

Notes on the Coffees

Had you asked us a year ago to describe coffee from East Timor, the answer would probably have begun with vague references to muted acidity and heavy body and ended with the caveat that we haven’t tasted much coffee from the island since Counter Culture stopped buying what long-time customers of ours might remember as Maubesse in 2006. Back then, it was an alternative to Sumatran coffee—the two islands are close geographically and until East Timor’s independence in 2001, they belonged to the same country, Indonesia. Though Sumatra was by far our best-selling single-origin coffee, we never developed much of a market for coffees from East Timor and, eventually, lackluster sales combined with inconsistencies in quality, complex logistics, and distance, led us to stop buying the coffee.

Eight years later, we are happy to re-introduce East Timor to our list of origins in a completely different context: this coffee won’t compete with Sumatra because we don’t currently source coffee from Sumatra, and while the body is still creamy, its undeniable acidity and stone-fruit flavors couldn’t be further from the flat, muted character of the olden days. It comes from smallholder farmers who grow coffee organically between 1,350 and 1,800 meters, which is higher elevation than most island coffees and undoubtedly contributes to the coffee’s tangy brightness. Despite the fact that the infamous Timor variety—the spontaneous hybrid of arabica and canephora coffee species—originates on this island, the farmers in Letefoho grow primarily typica coffee plants, so you should not expect to find the vegetal or woody flavors of the catimor, castillo, lempira or IHCAFE 90 types that we have sampled in our varieties tastings over the past few years.

Never has a representative of Counter Culture visited the country, and compared to other islands in the region like Sumatra and Sulawesi, it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention from quality-focused buyers in the North American coffee industry (when was the last time you read a trip report from East Timor?). We found Huapu and Lacau through the same Hong-Kong-based company, MTC Group, that introduced us our now-beloved coffees from Baroida and Tairora. MTC has built its business by sourcing coffees from the Pacific, including Australia’s few coffee farms, and we feel extremely fortunate to have access to these coffees (and as an aside, if you’re interested in learning more about East Timor from the perspective of MTC, this excellent trip report overfloweth with history and photos).

We bought a container of coffee from these producers this year and would have bought more but for the fact that they’ve never sold it to the United States before and their organic certificate is for the Japanese market, not ours. Next year we’ll be able to sell it as certified organic, which will allow us to buy more of it and use it in more products, and we can’t wait to continue developing this potential.

Rollout Dates and Availability

Both Lacau and Huapu roll out on Friday, and assuming they hold their flavors, they should be available for purchase through the middle of March.

Give the coffee lover in your life a lifetime’s worth of better brewing by registering them for a Counter Intelligence coffee course with us at one of our Counter Culture Coffee regional training centers!

We offer many different professional-level classes—from coffee brewing and tasting, to espresso, and even about the origins and training of coffee. Each course is a dynamic mix of coffee theory, tasting, and hands-on experience preparing or comparing coffee in a variety of contexts. Check our course catalogue for more detailed information about our offerings.

While we don’t currently offer vouchers or gift certificates for our courses, you're welcome to reserve a seat in any of our posted classes in advance—check our updated course calendar for dates and availability. Simply register and pay for the course using your own name and e-mail address to keep the gift a secret, and we’ll happily substitute your loved one’s name and contact information after you reveal the present, so they can receive any additional future e-mails or information about the class!

(If the class you select doesn’t work with your loved one’s schedule, no problem! As long as the space is canceled at least 48 hours before the class start time, you’ll automatically receive a full refund.)

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Brightness in the Winter

Though both of this week's coffees are new to our offering list, I suspect some of you could be convinced to love them before you even try them. Why? Well, this week we'll be tasting another fantastic single-farmer lot from a member of the Yirgacheffe Farmer Cooperative Union (YCFCU) of Ethiopia named Workiye Shallo alongside the inaugural roast of this year's Remera from Rwanda. On your marks, get set, slurp!

Notes on the Coffees

Of the many great coffees we bought this year from individual farmer members of YCFCU, Workiye Shallo's (wer-KAY-yuh SHA-llow) piqued my interest not only because it's another example of my favorite coffee taste profile, but also because she's the only woman out of the single farmers whose coffees we have celebrated this year. In Yirgacheffe, as in most coffee-producing communities globally, women are equal partners in the work of coffee production but seldom hold positions of power or receive recognition. Women are less likely than men to own land, and given how few members of YCFCU own the processing equipment that allows them to create these small, single-farmer lots, Workiye Shallo is a noteworthy exception. Workiye lives in Konga, which is one of many villages in the Yirgacheffe region where we've purchased coffee over the years, and she grows equal parts Kudhume and Wolisho varieties of coffee on the farm she owns with her husband, Ayele.

Remera's return heralds the beginning of our offering list's transition from northern-hemisphere African coffees—the many Ethiopian and Kenyan stars we've been celebrating for the past few months—to freshly arrived, southern-hemisphere coffees from Burundi and Rwanda. This washing station is among the highest in elevation in Rwanda and the family behind it, including mother Epiphanie and her sons Aloys and Samuel, are some of the most curious and well-connected people in the country's dynamic specialty coffee industry. Our collaboration with them over the years has resulted in quality experiments like the excellent sundried natural of two years ago and in our support of their pursuit of sustainability, as well: this year we're pleased to be contributing $5,000 from our Seeds fund to a project to diversify their farms and small farms around theirs by intercropping macadamia trees among their coffee plants. Almost all Rwandan coffee farms are shadeless monocultures and growers have no history of composting, so most rely heavily on chemical fertilizers to sustain their nutrient-poor soils and on mulch grass to keep dry soil from washing down the country's famous thousand hills during the rainy season.

Rollout Dates and Availability

Workiye Shallo's and Remera's coffees roll out on Friday and should be around, brightening our palates, through the middle of February.

NOTE: Unfortunately, construction in our Durham Training Center will not be finished in time to host a Tasting@Ten at that location this Friday. All other Training Centers are back on schedule. We're terribly sorry! Please join us next week. Thanks kindly for your patience and understanding.

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Hologram

This week we will deconstruct the fruity, complex Hologram and taste its three components in order to understand what each coffee brings to the blend.

Notes on the Coffees

Were I forced to reduce Hologram to a single word, I would choose the word fruity because the flavors of sundried natural Ethiopian coffees are unmistakable even in small quantities. But why choose a single word? Especially given that a hologram, by definition, is multi-dimensional. Though it’s not (yet) our best-selling year-round product, the growth in popularity of Hologram and its flavor profile over the past five years is something that excites me, primarily because the coffees that we use for Hologram are so good. Let’s talk about the current version, shall we?

We haven’t purchased coffee from the Asociación Integral Unidas Para Vivir Mejor (ASUVIM) in prior years, but we’re already making plans to purchase more from the harvest just getting underway on these small farms on the shores of Lake Atitlán in Guatemala. This coffee’s sweetness and milk chocolate flavors are reminiscent of coffee from La Voz, which is located just across the lake. Farming techniques, climate and varieties are similar between the two, and the region seems to incubate unusually good co-op names: ASUVIM’s full name roughly translates as the Comprehensive Association United to Live Better. We’re already buying as much coffee as is available from La Voz and between our company’s growth, the favorable growing conditions around Atitlán and how little age we taste in ASUVIM’s coffee this late in the year, I’m confident you’ll hear more about this group in the year to come. For now, this coffee comprises 60% of Hologram and isn’t used anywhere else.

Second on the table is the inimitable washed lot from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia’s Hama, which is still my favorite coffee among all of our offerings, even a year after its harvest. We use Hama's bright, floral notes to make Hologram more dynamic, especially upon the first sip, but we keep its percentage low (10%) so that the chocolate, fruit, and body brought by the other two components still dominates.

With as many single-producer coffees as we had from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, this year, including knockout sundried naturals from Aleme Wako and Elias Benata, we opted to dedicate the entirety of Biloya sundried natural to Hologram. Biloya tastes a bit more like chocolate and nut than those single-producer lots, which make it a good fit for this coffee, but it’s the berry flavors—which lend Hologram its characteristic fruitiness—that most people will identify immediately on the cupping table. Also, I expect many people would suspect that it makes up more than its current thirty percent of the blend.

As I mentioned at the outset, the coffees we are using in Hologram are exceptionally good ones. Big Trouble may outsell it, and I’d be a fool to deny people their preferences, but all of the coffees we use in Hologram are better and it’s the same price. Not to mention it comes in a purple bag. I know you’ll all enjoy it, but just in case, I’ll say it anyway: enjoy!

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Competition Is None

The Big Eastern competition opens on Friday and for this week’s tasting we’ve chosen three coffees that have appeared in the routines of competitors in barista and brewer’s cup competitions at the regional and national levels over the past two years.

Notes on the Coffees

After making its competition debut as part of Jonathan Bonchak’s routine for the US Brewer’s Cup in Seattle in April of 2014, Olke Birre’s coffee is the choice of multiple competitors in both brewing and espresso realms this weekend. In blind cuppings of our many Ethiopian coffees, Olke’s coffee consistently takes the top spot for its balance of floral aromatics and clear-as-a-bell citric acidity. In addition to possessing one of the most perfect flavor profiles we can imagine, this coffee’s appeal is compounded by the fact that it hails from a single farmer and that we know him personally, which is unusual in Ethiopia. Plus, as I’ve told you many times before, he is a head taller than most farmers and was wearing a gold medal when we first met him, so he made quite an impression.

Next up is Ngunguru, one of our current offerings from the flavor capital of the coffee world, Kenya. In the spirit of full transparency, I’ll admit that I meant to send Thiriku, on the wings of which Lem Butler soared to victory in the Southeast Barista Championship in 2012, but ended up typing Ngunguru, instead. Oops. But never you mind, for this coffee’s complexity is equal or superior to that of pretty much any other coffee you could imagine. It’s precisely that complexity—the combination of brightness, mouth-watering savory notes, and brothy body—that make Kenyan attractive for competition settings where unique tastes, memorable descriptors, and creative flavor pairings win points.

Papua New Guinea’s Tairora rounds out the lineup with juicy flavors that are reminiscent of today’s other two coffees, but with a fuller body and more notes of nut and sweet spice than we usually find in East African coffee. Erika Lee Vonie, now at Everyman Espresso, took Tairora to the national stage in April of this year and combined it with herbs and fresh cucumber for a delicious signature beverage. Of today’s three coffees, Tairora was harvested most recently, and, after two years of struggling with both shipping delays and inconsistent quality, it arrived early and is tasting great. We are very thankful to have found the Colbran family and their coffee farm, Baroida, four years ago, and Tairora, which comes from smaller farms around Baroida, demonstrates the mostly unrealized quality potential of these highlands.

Rollout Dates and Availability

All three coffees are available now, but Olke Birre’s time is running out, so savor these last sips. Ngunguru will be around through December, at least, and we hope Tairora will last through March, though it's selling like hotcakes, so I’m not making any promises.

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Holiday Coffee

In accordance with our annual tradition, we have created a unique coffee in honor of the winter holiday season yet again this year. Today’s tasting we will be the first time that many of us get to try the 2014 iteration, and for fun, we’ve included the two single-origin coffees that comprise the blend in addition to the holiday coffee to encourage further flavor exploration.

Notes on the Coffees

Holiday coffee is an interesting product. Looking at it one way, we could use almost any coffee and the product would still probably sell pretty well given that a) apparently coffee is a popular gift item, b) the word “holiday” is prominently displayed on the packaging, c) the packaging is especially nice, and d) it’s our company’s only consistent foray in the realm of “coffee for a cause,” which resonates with a different audience than our core customers. On the other hand, we want to use really delicious coffees as ingredients because we recognize that this will be many peoples’ first taste of Counter Culture Coffee and we want hook them on taste, story and everything else we do well.

This year’s holiday coffee combines two coffees from our favorite South American and African supplier cooperatives: Cenfrocafe of Jaén, Peru, and Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmer Cooperative Union (YCFCU) of Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Cenfrocafe’s coffee comes from a combination of producers from among their 2,400-and-counting members whose coffees stood out to the cooperative’s cuppers for being exceptionally clean and sweet. Although we don’t have the level of community specificity from this lot that we have from Valle del Santuario, the farms, elevation, and flavors are similar, and it’s coffees like this one that make Cenfrocafe our largest supplier from the Americas. Idido comes to us by way of YCFCU, from which coop we buy more coffee than from any other. Our holiday coffee from 2011 also came from YCFCU and, at the time, the Coffee Department talked about it as part of a campaign to popularize Ethiopian coffees. Three years later, coffees like Idido have made their way into more of our blends and year-round products over and they have and slowly but insistently shaped both flavor profiles and palates around their floral and citrusy characteristics.

Just as the packaging and ingredient philosophy of our holiday coffee continue to evolve every year, so does our goal with the per-pound donation. We have used holiday coffees to raise money for local charities, NGOs working in coffee-producing communities, and projects spearheaded by farms and cooperatives whose coffee we purchase, and the steady growth of our company has resulted in an ever-bigger pot of funds to donate. Growth is great, of course, but we’ve found that at times, the amount of money we raise can be overwhelming for the comparatively small-scale projects that our suppliers undertake, so we were looking for a way to break it up this year. Conveniently, CCC has a program called SEEDS that awards small grants of three to five thousand dollars to suppliers of ours, and since its creation in 2010 we’ve received applications from, and funded, producers across Latin America and East Africa as they planted trees, held compost trainings for their members, and developed strategies for income diversification. Instead of choosing a single project as the outlet for this year’s holiday fundraising, we’ll use the money to bulk increase the SEEDS budget by almost 50% and reach more growers across our diverse supply chains. Also, instead of limiting the donation opportunity to this one particular coffee and thereby sending the signal that the purchase of one does good and the purchase of the other… doesn’t… we opted to make the donation apply to any coffee purchased from CCC during the months of November and December. It’s less convenient to promote than one dollar per pound, but it’s worth the work of explaining because it’s a better representation of the holistic, measured approach we take to building relationships and buying coffee.

Rollout Dates and Availability

This year’s holiday coffee rolled out at the beginning of the month and we’ll sell it through the first week of January 2015.

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Peru + Peru = PERU

Today we welcome Chirinos and Huabal—both from the Cenfrocafe cooperative, the same co-op that brings us Valle del Santuario and La Frontera coffees from Peru.

Notes on the Coffees

Cenfrocafe has long been a darling of the coffee department. They are forward thinking, have sound business practices (for the most part), ask the right questions about how to maintain the balance of quality and volume of coffees, and do their very best to put advice received from multiple sources into action.

With these coffees, we embark on the process of getting more-transparent coffees that hit higher quality marks from this important, historic partner. We hope that these coffees are just the beginning of increased volumes, transparency, and quality out of Peru.

Chirinos
Chirinos is known as the land of coffee and natural forests. Cedar, eucalyptus, and pine trees abound. They are also well known for some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the area. The coffee farms are broken up into three altitude groups, high, medium, and low.

Many of the farms in the mountains of the region have only been settled and planted for a generation, as opposed to the southern regions of Peru where the agricultural history dates back millennia. Cenfrocafe's members hail from some 30-odd communities around Jaén and smaller towns like San Ignacio, Chirinos, and Tabaconas.

Chirinos has 11 base organizations that deliver coffee to Cenfrocafe and 235 members total.

Look for: creamy, caramel, plum flavors

Huabal
Huabal (pronounced wa-BALL) is known as a higher altitude quality coffee growing zone. In addition to coffee, there are large areas of protected forest and unique wild animals that add to the biodiversity of the area. Their base organizations are located close to our long-term favorite Valle del Santuario in San Ignacio, Peru.

Huabal has 8 base organizations that deliver coffee to Cenfrocafe and 284 members total.

Look for: pronounced flavors of almond and green grape

Rollout Dates and Availability

Both coffees are already available for purchase as of this week. We will likely have Chirinos in house for about a month-and-a-half while Huabal will be closer to three months because we have a larger volume of this coffee.